Why Study Deforestation?

In May 2017, I took the bus along the highway, paved only in 2011, from Cusco to Puerto Maldonado in Peru’s Amazon, as I was curious to learn more about the impacts of gold mining in the Amazon. What amazed me was the striking difference between the deforested areas on the Peruvian and Brazilian sides of the border, even though both countries shared the same Interoceanic Highway. I later found that the differences were not only along the roadsides, but also in satellite images. There was much more pastureland and vast deforested areas in Acre in comparison to Peru. Why was this? Why did the deforestation mostly stop at the border of Peru? I started to explore this more in detail, as I felt that something crucial was missing from the explanations of deforestation that I had usually encountered. I visited sites of gold extraction and ranching to explore how these economic activities, and sectors held power locally and nationally, and thus explore how they explained the deforestation patterns in this border area. The days were long, as I scoped how cattle ranching was expanding inside conservation areas, displacing the magnificent 50-meter-tall canopy of thick trees. I wanted to explore how and where these transformations were still taking place, and why. This experience is part of what led me to embark on this journey to uncover the deeper causes and locals’ responses, including resistance, to forest removals (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1

A soybean businessman on his plantation in Nova Mutum, Mato Grosso. Soybean plantations directly and indirectly drive the deforestation happening in the Amazon and elsewhere. November 2019.

Figure 1.1 Long description

A man walking through a soybean plantation in Nova Mutum, Mato Grosso. The man is dressed in casual attire, walking along a muddy passage between rows of soybean plants. The sky is overcast, and there is a puddle of water on the path. The image highlights the agricultural landscape and its implications for deforestation.

Photo by author.

Deforestation – replacing natural forests with pastures, mines, tree plantations, or other human-centered activities – has been on the increase in different parts of the world, including in high forest cover countries such as Brazil, Peru, and Finland.Footnote ¹ The recent resource and forest policies at the regional and national levels in all these countries suggest that there will continue to be increases in deforestation.

Building on my earlier work, which began in 2004 on natural resource politics, I started the intense field research for this book in 2017, as it became clear that deforestation rates, which previously had decreased, were once again increasing. Many policymakers and even scholars thought that the problem of deforestation in the Amazon had mostly been solved (e.g. Thaler, Reference Thaler2017). In the Brazilian Amazon in 2012, a record low of 4,571 square kilometers were deforested, but in 2016 the figure had already jumped to 7,989 square kilometers (Spera et al., Reference Spera, Galford, Coe, Macedo and Mustard2016) and surpassed 10,000 square kilometers in 2019 and 2020 (Hecht et al., Reference Hecht, Schmink, Abers, Nobre, Encalada and Anderson2021; Pereira & Viola, Reference Pereira and Viola2021). The low figures in 2012 could be argued to have largely been a result of a long sociopolitical process, which was no longer operating in the same way as it had between 1990 and 2010. The post-2010 Brazilian Amazon development phase has been characterized as “post-environmentalism,” while the 1990–2009 period was more of a “socioenvironmentalism” phase. This means that the earlier period’s valorization of biodiversity and sustainable forest-based livelihoods has been replaced by a strong support given to agribusiness, creation of land markets, and assigning monetary value to environmental services (Toledo et al., Reference Toledo, Briceño and Ospina2018). This creation of deeper capitalism is having major impacts on forest cover and the ability of people to protect their forests. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated trend happening only in Brazil as similar situations are also experienced elsewhere.

Studies of deforestation have found that the dynamics are so complex that single-factor causation models, broad-scale statistical models, and remote models are unable to capture the causalities (Geist & Lambin, Reference Geist and Lambin2002). Nevertheless, based on reviewing a large set of rich local case studies, Geist and Lambin (Reference Geist and Lambin2002) identified agricultural expansion, wood extraction, and infrastructure extension as the most frequent proximate causes, while the key underlying driving forces of deforestation appear to be economic factors, institutions, national policies, and remote influences. Their synthesis was an advance over the prior views, which held population growth and shifting cultivation as the primary causes of deforestation. Still, it is typical for deforestation studies to be either review studies, studies that use a macro lens that is too broad and quantitative, or studies that use a micro lens, which only considers very specific local case studies. It is rare to find broader-scale systematic regional comparisons based on detailed field research. There is also a lot of research that is dedicated to trying to find the silver bullet of how to best avoid deforestation (Nolte et al., Reference Nolte, Gobbi and de Waroux2017), which, paradoxically, might yield fewer results about the actual problematic processes causing deforestation. However, the theoretical-methodological approach suggested herein can be helpful in uncovering the deep causalities of deforestation, which have been given too little attention in most studies.

Contributing to Prior Studies on Global Deforestation with the Regionally Dominant Political Economy Theory

A series of recent books have discussed global deforestation (e.g. Runyan & D’Odorico, Reference Runyan and D’Odorico2016), its governance (e.g. Dehm, Reference Dehm2021; Nikolakis & Innes, Reference Nikolakis and Innes2020), and grassroots resistance (e.g. Juniper, Reference Juniper2019). There is also a large literature discussing at least tangentially deforestation dynamics from various viewpoints, and the accounts in these can be related to analysis of deforestation causes as including neodevelopmentalist state policies (e.g. Bratman, Reference Bratman2019), violent land privatization and speculation along infrastructural expansion (e.g. Campbell, Reference Campbell2015), and onto-epistemic underpinnings of how forests are (not) considered, in practice, to include an array of life by the powerful actors, such as soybean plantation expanders, radically regulating or restructuring life (e.g. Hetherington, Reference Hetherington2020; Kröger, Reference Kröger2022). There is also a very large number of older books on deforestation and forest degradation in different contexts, especially from the 1980s and 1990s, and I will relate my theorizing and findings to them in the different parts of this book. The situation has changed dramatically in the past few years, due to the worsening of the climatic-ecological crisis and looming tipping points, which now need to be used to frame studies, for example, Amazon deforestation as not merely a study of deforestation, but more as a study of a global climate tipping point.

Yet very few books on global deforestation explicitly tackle or frame the key issue around global climate tipping points. The work by Pereira and Viola (Reference Pereira and Viola2021) is an exception. They provide an international relations perspective that compares the differing politics of four Amazonian countries related to the creation of biodiversity policies through 2019. This book makes a major contribution by introducing the concept of the Amazon tipping point to a broader audience. With my work, I have deepened the focus on specific economic sectors, their political economy, and the role of enabling and resisting moral economies.

The comparisons in this book can explain, for example, why the deforestation of the Amazon has followed very different paths in Brazil and Peru, even though these countries are neighbors with similar road networks. Scholars who attempt to identify the most efficient anti-deforestation policies have found that such policies will vary depending on the commodity frontier in question (Nolte et al., Reference Nolte, Gobbi and de Waroux2017), but they have not gone deeper into explaining why this is. However, their results do hint at the importance of studying the type of extractive capitalist system that is in operation. In all three countries, Peru, Brazil, and Finland, there are important regional divergences in deforestation drivers, which allowed me to study and understand some of the complex reasons for contemporary global deforestation. To increase the understanding about how deforestation takes place, I make a detailed comparison of several regions within these countries to illustrate the links between their respective dominant economic models and different varieties of extractivist capitalism (Dunlap & Jakobsen, Reference Dunlap and Jakobsen2020; Gudynas, Reference Gudynas, Veltmeyer and Lau2020; Kröger, Reference Kröger2022; Ye et al., Reference Ye, Van Der Ploeg, Schneider and Shanin2020). I explain deforestation from the viewpoint of political economy, wherein the key drivers and ultimate causes of deforestation can be found within the core of the dominant economic groups in each country and region. The aim is to contribute toward a new theory about the causes of deforestation, which could improve the accuracy of causal claims in several fields of study.

I argue that deforestation can be explained by the character and dynamics of the current international system and regionally dominant political economies (RDPEs). Of key importance are extractivist sectors (see Durante et al., Reference Durante, Kröger, LaFleur, Shapiro and McNeish2021; Nygren et al., Reference Nygren, Kröger and Gills2022) which both cause and rely on deforestation; these sectors include ranching, plantation, mining, and forestry, all of which have specific political economies and, thus, specific causal links to deforestation. The observation of these mining, agrarian, and forestry extractivisms (Kröger, Reference Kröger2020a; Kröger & Ehrnström-Fuentes, Reference Kröger, Ehrnström-Fuentes, McKay, Alonso-Fradejas and Ezquerro-Cañete2021; McKay et al., Reference McKay, Fradejas and Ezquerro-Cañete2021; Petras & Veltmeyer, Reference Petras, Veltmeyer, Petras and Veltmeyer2014) can help to deepen understandings of the ultimate drivers of contemporary deforestation. These are rooted in the historical context of long-term, world-systemic capital accumulations of specific extractive operations.

The interstate system, with its competition for power and the resulting wars, has been a key cause (or even the main cause) for explaining why forests have been so wantonly destroyed, as I will explain in the end of this book. For approximately 5,000 years as the world system has expanded (Frank & Gills, Reference Frank, Gills, Frank and Gills1994) civilizations have eaten away at forests (Perlin, Reference Perlin2005) – whole empires have even collapsed after depleting their forests (Chew, Reference Chew2001). These processes have intensified during the past 550 years’ capitalist world-ecology (Braudel, Reference Braudel1992; Moore, Reference Moore2003). The histories of forests and logging show a clear picture of how huge natural forest areas were destroyed primarily through the process of interstate competition and the wars of the emerging European colonial powers (Moore, Reference Moore2015; Perlin, Reference Perlin2005). For example, the demands for masts for imperial ships, tar, and planks for building sailing vessels ate entire forests in the Eastern United States (Perlin, Reference Perlin2005). The Caribbean monoculture plantations required cutting down trees for firewood; wood was brought quickly from outside of the colonial islands to the plantation operations, to enrich the warmaking modern states. In sum, the violence and quest for power by European elites was in essence a war on forests. This was in no way a rational or enlightened process. Countless warship fleets, and other items made from wood and other elements stripped from living nature, were sunk, wasted, burned, pillaged, ravaged, forgotten, and used thoughtlessly. This state of affairs continues, as can be seen in the enormous bootprints of modern military machineries, as Belcher et al. (Reference Belcher, Bigger, Neimark and Kennelly2020) call the weight of militaries within the global geopolitics of ecology. Analyses of geopolitical ecology also need to consider the way armed forces of different types are related to the expansion or resistance of extractivisms and the existences of beings (Kröger, Reference Kröger2022). Their role in today’s world is certainly key, as, among many others, the Bolsonaro regime in Brazil was in essence a military-composed government, which used its own logics to deepen extractivisms and disregard life (Penido & da Gama Janot, Reference Penido and da Gama Janot2021). Therefore, if the ultimate causes of extractivisms are sought, they must include the international system and its dynamics, laws, and key actors, which are not the same as governments or states, but include more specific actor categories such as the armed forces. Besides this, the specific economic sectors affecting politics in the interpenetrated capital-state system need to be analyzed.

My analysis challenges prior notions on nation-state centrality, offering regionally dominant extractivist sectors as the key units of explanation. This is in line with the recent focus on the Capitalocene and the Plantationocene (instead of the Anthropocene) as an explanation of the planetary havoc currently being caused by large-scale monocultural plantations. Extractivist frontiers are central for the capitalist world-ecology, as Wolford (Reference Wolford2021: 1628), drawing on Moore (Reference Moore2017, Reference Moore2018), argues: “The boundary of the nation-state was not the national border; rather, the boundary was the commodity frontier that nations laid claim to and protected with an ever-more elaborate set of rules.” I make the claim that these commodity frontiers are also often frontiers of deforestation. These commodity frontiers take varying forms, from mining to ranching and forestry, but whatever their form, they lead to the decimation of natural and seminatural forests. These forests are replaced with extractivist spaces and enclaves, which are hard or even impossible to revert to forests. These violences are hidden by justifying discourses, which frame forestry corporations as forest companies while they are actually anti-forest companies, basing their business on the destruction of forests. The international system of rivalling nation-states, or states which retain a system of free trade of commodities to enrich themselves, their elites, and companies, explains at the global level why these extractivisms can continue. I will study these international dynamics at the end of this book.

My analysis draws from extensive fieldwork, including hundreds of interviews (in local languages) and dozens of field research visits since 2005 to different parts of the Amazon and Finland. While I conducted field research and participant observation in the forest areas of all the locales in this book, my field research in Brazil is the most extensive. It should also be noted that many of the citations and quotes from existing research publications, interviews, and other documents were originally published in Spanish, Portuguese, and Finnish and have been translated by me into English. Next, I will more explicitly explain some of the extensive fieldwork that underlies the analyses presented herein.

In 2005, I started doing research in Pará, Brazil, focusing on the Santarém region and extractive reserves and other conservation areas further south along the BR-163 highway. I also conducted research in this region in 2007, 2011, 2018, 2019, and 2023–2024 (see Figures 1.2 and 2.1). In November and December 2019, I traveled from Brazil’s Cuiabá to Santarém, covering 2,500 kilometers of Amazon roads, while doing field research on the causes of deforestation under the Bolsonaro regime and how locals experience this. In March and April 2022, I did multisited political ethnography on deforestation dynamics in Bahia and Acre’s Rio Branco and Cruzeiro do Sul regions, next to the border with Peru. In November 2023 to January 2024, I did further field research in the Santarém and Belém regions of the Brazilian Amazon. I have also previously studied mining and industrial forestry in the Carajás region of the eastern Amazon in Brazil.

Figure 1.2

Field visits in the Amazon, from 2005 onward.

Figure 1.2 Long description

Map showing field visit locations by the author to perform research on the causes of deforestation under the Bolsonaro regime in the Amazon region from 2005 onward. It covers the research regions in Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia, including Acre and Madre de Dios. Water bodies, country borders, highways, and research areas.

Base map data from openstreetmap.org.

In addition to the mentioned work done in the border region with Peru, between May and June in 2017 I did field research in Peru’s Madre de Dios province and the Andean-Amazonian region there, and in Brazil’s Acre, alongside the Interoceanic Highway and the differentiated landscapes and territories close to it (see Figure 1.3).

Figure 1.3

An illegal gold mine east of Castelo dos Sonhos in the Novo Progresso region of Brazil. Gold mining causes mercury, silt, and other pollution, and deforestation and degradation in the Amazon. November 2019.

Figure 1.3 Long description

An illegal gold mine in the Amazon rainforest. The scene shows deforested land with uprooted trees and mounds of earth. In the foreground on the left, a rudimentary wooden structure is supported by many vertical wooden poles submerged in mud, likely used for mining operations. The background features a hilly landscape with sparse vegetation, indicative of environmental degradation. The image highlights the impact of gold mining on the Amazon ecosystem.

Photo by author.

While my analysis of Finland is based on having lived in the Finnish countryside for most of my life, more recently I have also embarked on more focused field research in different parts of Finland, especially on the rise of Arctic pulp investments and clearcutting for so-called bioeconomy (see Figure 1.4).

Figure 1.4

A clearcut old spruce forest in South Karelia, Finland. Clearcutting is the dominant method of forestry in Finland, driven by a hegemonic paper and pulp industry and an increasing demand for energywood. Old-growth and natural forests are removed, completely transforming the landscape and ecology for decades, even centuries. September 2022.

Photo by author.

Through multisited political ethnography (Kröger, Reference Kröger2021; Schatz, Reference Schatz and Schatz2009), I will provide three interlinked case studies of different global, yet regionally territorialized, extractive sectors. This will provide a synergy benefit, as one can only truly start to understand the nature and working dynamics, effects, and politics of sectors and their differing regionally situated world-ecologies (i.e. contexts) through a detailed understanding and comparison of various sectors. The case studies in the book are studies of different sectors and systems, but these analyses are rooted to specific places and territories, as these extractivist sectors draw their power from the dynamics in place. It is not common to have a detailed multisectorial understanding, which allows for a comparative political economy that is also ethnographically informed. Initially, I studied the global industrial forestry in detail, especially in its Nordic and Latin American variations, developing an understanding of how Finland and Finnish industrial forestry function as cores of the global forestry system (Kröger, Reference Kröger2013a). After my forestry studies, I then started to analyze global mining, specializing in the mining politics in Brazil and India (Kröger, Reference Kröger2020a, Reference Kröger2021). It is essential to have sectorial and subsectorial expertise to create sufficiently robust and nuanced explanations of political economies. For example, for this book, I have made a detailed study that examines the interlinked ranching, plantation, mining, dam-building, and land speculation sectors in Brazil.

The power of deforesters becomes visible in satellite images when comparing Acre and Madre de Dios (see Figure 1.5). Brazil shows much more deforestation than Peru. I argue that this is caused primarily by the dominance of ranching-grabbing. In January 2024, I asked Augusto Molanovich, who is working for Peru’s Forest Service on deforestation regulation, why there is far less ranching-based deforestation in Peru. He explained that there is far more state support – in all senses – for ranching in Brazil than in Peru. States are birthing extractivisms by several means (Ehrnström-Fuentes & Kröger, Reference Ehrnström-Fuentes and Kröger2018). For Molanovich, the crucial part was the state technical support for ranching in Brazil, while in Peru there is much more support for gold mining.

Figure 1.5

A series of satellite images showing the border between Peru, Brazil, and Bolivia. Note the extensive deforestation on the Brazilian side of the border in the state of Acre over the same period.

Satellite photos from GoogleEarthPro.

Deforestation at Tipping Points

The focus on forests is timely for both theory and practice. The traditional and modern uses of forests are deserving topics, given the current hype and reality of the bioeconomy (Pülzl et al., Reference Pülzl, Kleinschmit and Arts2014) and the multiplying industrial-scale uses of wood (Radkau, Reference Radkau2012), as well as the rise in deforestation and related conflicts. The situation is particularly pertinent in Brazil and Peru, but also in Finland, where there is intense debate, as researchers and the general public are largely excluded from the decision-making processes that keep clearcutting at a high level (see e.g. BIOS, 2017). Deforestation can have huge socioenvironmental impacts, especially given the direct link of these territorial and landscape changes to development and sustainability, as well as to politics, ideology, culture, and – most importantly – to what exists, where, and how (Kröger, Reference Kröger2022). In other words, the so-called lived environments (Taylor, Reference Taylor, Duhn, Malone and Tesar2020) or socionatures (Hecht, Reference Hecht2012) of multiple species. In looking at deforestation, it is essential to have a nonanthropocentric vision. In other words, the whole assemblage of beings and relations in the global web of life should be taken into consideration.

Currently the world is rapidly losing so much forest that there are now major constraints and economic risks to the actors and sectors, such as the soybean-feed-fuel complex, logging, and ranching, which cause the demise of the world’s forests (see Dietz et al., Reference Dietz, Rising, Stoerk and Wagner2021). The Amazon is at the brink of a tipping point, where further deforestation most likely means large swathes of the rainforest will irreversibly turn into grassland (Lovejoy & Nobre, Reference Lovejoy and Nobre2018). The combination of fragmentation and degradation by turning huge areas of forest into pastures, dams, roads, logging sites, and plantations has meant that there is an increase in heat and droughts as rains are becoming scarcer (Staal et al., Reference Staal, Flores and Aguiar2020).

Yet, this epochal moment has not slowed down deforestation, but, quite the contrary, it has led to deeper extractivist drives that take many different forms. Post-2019, the increased deforestation around the world has targeted protected and Indigenous territories. The regimes of the Amazon, including the so-called populist leftist powers such as Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, have driven deforesting activities deeper into forests, which has sparked major social conflicts between the outsider extractors and local Indigenous and other forest populations, who are calling out these “progressive” governments as authoritarian (Ebus & Martinelli, Reference Ebus and Martinelli2022; Ranta, Reference Ranta2024; Tilzey, Reference Tilzey, Scoones, Edelman and Borras2021). This situation intensified during the pandemic, as illegal miners and others entered unguarded Indigenous areas, also spreading COVID-19, to which Indigenous people were the most vulnerable in Latin America (Praeli, Reference Praeli2020). It is important to emphasize the increased and systemic socioenvironmental attacks by the Bolsonaro regime and other actors on the Amazon and its people during the pandemic (Ferrante & Fearnside, Reference Ferrante and Fearnside2020) to understand why and how deforestation is now on the rise. This deforestation is also targeting protected and Indigenous territories (de Belmont, Reference de Belmont2024; Gimenez, Reference Gimenez2023). Indigenous peoples have been shown to be by far the best protectors of forest cover, with demarcation of traditional lands delivering forest protection much better than the creation of national parks which keep people from living directly on the land (Dawson et al., Reference Dawson, Coolsaet and Sterling2021; Qin et al., Reference Qin, Xiao and Liu2023; Tran et al., Reference Tran, Ban and Bhattacharyya2020).

The current world-ecology, with its periodically occurring epochal moments, provides incentives and guidelines for decision-makers not to tackle deforestation. Instead, when commodity prices rise due to a war or pandemic, it is easy to overlook the forest and see just the trees that can be cut for profit. For example, the pandemic, and the prior epochal moments during major wars, show how such events make governments blind to forests, lustful toward them, or both. Commodity prices rise with both the preparations for war and the infrastructure repair required after war. The COVID-19 pandemic, the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the 2023 Israeli invasion of Gaza have seen the prices of lumber, beef, and gold reach record highs. This has huge impacts in terms of deforestation, yet often these impacts are not noted as more important events are occurring in the human world – as with the epochal moments of war. The international system of rival nation-states, or states that retain a system of free trade of commodities to enrich themselves, their elites, and companies, explains how and why this state of affairs continues at the level of global extractivisms.

However, changes might be forthcoming, as the world, and especially those nations whose elites’ existence, stability, and strength rely on continued raw material production, start to face the new realities that excessive deforestation brings. For example, Brazil is highly reliant on rainfall and stable climatic conditions to maintain its agroextractivist plantations. In some places changes may start to take place that would cause forests to gain more importance in the popular consciousness, while in other places it might already be too late to reverse negative impacts to forests due to the dynamics of tipping points. However, a change in the role given to forests would suggest a challenge to the old and established dynamics that dictate how forests are treated within the current international system. To change the relation to forests and deforestation poses fundamental questions and might require fundamental changes in the global system. For example, what happens when a country going to war can no longer rely on being able to tap into forests as a source of cheap or good-quality raw materials?

There is a need for more detailed political economic analyses to be able to answer such questions, and better understand the international system, with its many different subsystems composed of sectors that are partly interlinked and partly compete for same land areas. These need to be regionally situated, world-ecological analyses (Moore, Reference Moore2015), which consider the power that specific sectors have in causing the loss of forests, such as mining in Peru, ranching in Brazil, and forestry in Finland. There is a need to more deeply understand the role of these forces that drive deforestation. Additionally, there is a need to understand the local-level enabling factors, such as local forest-dwellers allowing deforestation on their lands, which is a phenomenon currently gaining traction in different parts of the world. The different forms of resistance against deforestation also need to be studied and incorporated into an overall model, which incorporates the comparison of regional dynamics within the global system. I will analyze these political economies of deforestation. I do this by a transdisciplinary reading of the current knowledge on deforestation drivers, enablers, and resistance. This is based on an analysis of different contextual reasons for deforestation, across countries, which is then linked to an analysis on the qualities of the international system as drivers of deforestation.

Theorizing the Political and Moral Economies Underlying Deforestation

The analytical premise in my work on RDPEs is that political economies can form systems that define the use of territory. Some sectors – political economies (in my view, economic sectors are always embedded in politics) – can become dominant in certain regions. These systems are varieties of extractive capitalism that can be seen as RDPEs, which are inextricably linked to the key processes that drive tipping points, including the loss of natural environments. A key feature of an RDPE is that there are only a limited number of logistical actors and corporations who are involved in this sector, and each is tied to specific governments, states, funds, and persons that have their own interests for pursuing profit by expanding the established system. I argue that if an RDPE has taken hold of a particular polity and territory, it can have a dominant role in defining how the land is used in that territory. I study these territory-controlling systems as necessary – possibly even sufficient – factors to explain where and why extractivism continues, and why global (financial) capitalism is insufficient to solely explain the root causes of why these systems continue to expand even at the peril of climactic-ecological tipping points.

One reason why I suggest this new theory on the crucial importance of RDPEs is that analysis of the developments in the Amazon Rainforest throughout the decades has typically failed to provide accurate future prognoses of deforestation trends. For example, leading analysts argued in the early 1990s that the resource frontier of deforesting the Amazon had collapsed (e.g. Cleary, Reference Cleary1993). However, in the late 1990s and early 2000s there was resurgence of this deforesting frontier, which included peak forest loss figures. Similarly, the 2004–2011 period showed a major curbing of Amazon deforestation (Hecht et al., Reference Hecht, Schmink, Abers, Nobre, Encalada and Anderson2021) and analysts hypothesized that the problem of deforestation was then mostly solved (e.g. Hecht, Reference Hecht2012). Yet again, against expectations, post-2012 Brazil has expanded Amazon deforestation due to the RDPE of ranching, agribusiness, mining, and illegal land grabbing.

The suggested theory on RDPEs challenges claims that emphasize the centrality of free-flowing global financial capitalism and capital, which could supposedly freely flow from one place to another as regulations or resistance increase (e.g. Silver, Reference Silver2003). My new theory builds around the concepts and notions of territorially vested interests and sunk costs, where it is hard – if not impossible – to move heavy productive facilities to other contexts (e.g. the soybean–corn complexes in Brazil). These are also not just any form of “capitalism,” but specific sectors, which require their own detailed analysis – as the sectors of so-called capitalism have their own sublogics that cannot be understood by a more general account. I build on the notions of technological lock-ins (Carrillo-Hermosilla, Reference Carrillo-Hermosilla2006; Foxon, Reference Foxon and Shogren2013; Helmrich et al., Reference Helmrich, Chester, Miller and Allenby2023) and path dependency (Atkinson, Reference Atkinson2014; Browder, Reference Browder1986; Chavez & Perz, Reference Chavez and Perz2013; Ferrer Velasco et al., Reference Ferrer Velasco, Köthke, Lippe and Günter2020; Mahoney, Reference Mahoney2000) to lay out the functioning mechanisms and type of ecological power that are created within the sectors that use these resources. This adds to world-ecology’s more abstract work on capitalism-in-nature and historical natures (Moore, Reference Moore2015), using that holistic and nondualist approach to lay out how particular territorial and physical terrain shifts make it hard to pursue neoliberal or Ricardian accounts of supposedly freely moving and adjusting (commodity) markets (Ricardo, Reference Ricardo1821).

In many disciplines, there is still a belief that polluting production can move quite freely to a new context due to changes in regulations. For example, in a panel discussion I spoke in on the state of Finland’s forests, a forestry scholar expressed a wish he and others in the industry held (many forestry departments seem to be part of the global system or a sector themselves within industrial forestry). He indicated that he wanted to have a 1,000-kilometer perimeter of monoculture eucalyptus plantations to avert deforestation elsewhere. He would have placed this colossal plantation and pulp mill in Brazil – this very notion a sign of not understanding the impossibility and violence, colonial and imperialist thinking included in such an imagination of supposed empty spaces, wherein a particular political economy could be imposed (see Scott, Reference Scott2020). In another example, a prominent climate change writer in Finland argued that oil palm plantations should be expanded globally as they are the best solution to create biofuels, given their energy efficiency in comparison to soy, corn, or sugarcane-based fuels. Once again, this misses the implications for imposing these political economies. Additionally, my theory helps to explain why this is unlikely due to the already vested interests in place of particular industrial sectors, who profit on the already existing land use and would see something like oil palm as a competitor. Thus, the land use is locked in. In this manner, the theory established in Clearcut will be helpful in making more realistic assessments of the political, economic, and socioterritorial constraints of (commodity) markets.

The theorizing here is new in several ways. I seek to specifically answer the need for a more grounded, empirically based explanation of the deeper, systemic causes of deforestation. Thus, this work goes beyond proximate explanations, remote-sensing-based explanations, and economic-type analyses, which have dominated the overall deforestation discussion.

There has been a substantial political ecology work on deforestation, and I will build on this (e.g. by Susanna Hecht, Nancy Peluso, Tania Li, and Anja Nygren). That said, I call my work political economy rather than political ecology, due to my greater focus on the sectors involved and their systemic role as RDPEs that form a whole; thus, having intersectorial impacts on deforestation. I will link my ethnographic work across multiple sites to broader discussions on global ecology and the international system, as my book falls more firmly within the field of global development studies and global climate and environmental studies. Thus, it contributes to these fields a detailed assessment of how varying and distinct economic sectors compose what is known as global capitalism.

First, the new theory relates to and builds on political ecology and economy work. I strive to provide a more direct focus on political economic dynamics, broadly understood, especially through the new literature on extractivisms. The concept of extractivism, which surfaced in the 2010s and has grown, especially since the early 2020s, is a key concept to assess why governments have embarked on new commodity boom-based development strategies. Different types of extractivisms, such as agroextractivism, mining, oil, and forestry extractivism, are supported in Latin America and elsewhere by a wide variety of governments (Gudynas, Reference Gudynas2015; McKay et al., Reference McKay, Fradejas and Ezquerro-Cañete2021; Petras & Veltmeyer, Reference Petras, Veltmeyer, Petras and Veltmeyer2014; Svampa, Reference Svampa2019). Within studies on the politics of extraction, the concept of extractivism is also important in challenging the underlying drivers and onto-epistemologies of the extraction–development nexus (Kröger, Reference Kröger and James2020b). For example, instead of assuming that the addition of value-adding resource-based industrialization at a particular place would be a preferable outcome rather than mere raw material export, new studies on extractivisms (e.g. Dunlap & Jakobsen, Reference Dunlap and Jakobsen2020; Shapiro & McNeish, Reference Shapiro and McNeish2021; Willow, Reference Willow2020) have started to challenge the modern, Western, and – given the global climate tipping points – clearly perilous accounts in the prior resource-development literature.

Second, a lot of the current discussion on the development–climate catastrophe interface is too abstract, revolving around the concept of the Anthropocene (e.g. Crutzen, Reference Crutzen, Ehlers and Krafft2006) or global capitalism, which can be seen as totalizing concepts. How do you stop or regulate global capitalism or the Anthropocene in reality? Many people in the broad political left have a vague conception of revolution, a rhetoric to overthrow capitalism. Thus, I suggest the theory of RDPEs as a corrective to “global capitalism” (e.g. Gilpin, Reference Gilpin, Lawton, Rosenau and Verdun2018) and other abstract concepts. I concretize the theory through the key drivers and extractive sectors, such as Brazil’s deforesting capitalisms, the Amazon’s gold miners’, and Finnish forestry industry pushes toward mining capitalism and bioeconomy, respectively. Each sector typically has singular studies, for example, some scholars of extraction focus just on mining (see Kröger, Reference Kröger2020a, for a review of literature). I focus on several forms of extractivism, developing a comparison that includes ranching and agroextractivism, mining and forestry with their crucial and specific financial and asset speculation aspects. For example, in the case of Amazon gold mining I learned that, to understand the sector, one must also understand the dynamics of international money laundering, which is linked to rising drug trafficking and organized crime.

Meanwhile, the current key role of a clearcutting and tree plantation-expansion-based pulp and paper industry in designating the use and future of Finnish forests is due to the dominant and hegemonic position of pulping as an RDPE in Finland. Pulp, with its attendant side and by-products, serves as a key potential raw material for increasing the multiple and flexible uses of trees (Kröger, Reference Kröger2016). In Finland thus far the promise of new fossil-fuel substituting wood products has been mostly an anticipated, marketed, and imagined future, used for gaining support and financing for new mega pulp mills marketed as bioproduct refineries, for example the Äänekoski and Kemi mills of Metsä Group. However, despite the promises, in practice these so-called biorefineries are still just massive pulp mills and the diversification away from pulp has not been realized. Pulp is a bulk commodity, so it can be produced from low-quality wood and the production volumes are flexible and can change to follow global market fluctuations. Besides noting this particularity of pulp, which explains its dominance versus less tangible and malleable wood commodities, Kellokumpu and Säynäjäkangas (Reference Kellokumpu and Säynäjäkangas2022: 39) note that capitalistic economies and production processes in general have the tendency to become “attached to particular resources,” a characteristic I explore when studying deforesting RDPEs. It is hard for RDPE members to let go of their favored commodity and production methods, be these cattle and land grabbing in Brazil’s cattle capitalism, mercury and money laundering linked to gold mining in the Amazon, or clearcut wood pulping in Finland. Therefore, capital and the economy are much less fluid, malleable, or transforming than David Ricardo-type theorists see these – as being able to move quickly anywhere based on “comparative advantage” or production costs.

Another key concept is the influence of regional moral economies. Through this concept, I study the daily territorial use practices and decisions that affect forests. The concept of “moral economy” (Thompson, Reference Thompson1963, Reference Thompson1971) refers to the importance of the underlying regional customs, contexts, and cultures that explain why certain political economic changes and policies fail, encounter opposition, or succeed (see Wolford, Reference Wolford2010). “Moral economy” is used as the basis for a systemic analysis of what happens at the social level within a process of conflictive extractivism. I assess how moral economies have formed historically and how they currently affect the forests in the Amazon (Brazil and Peru) and Finland. Regional moral economies are hypothesized to be key in explaining where the thrust of deforesting extractivism is allowed or resisted. These moral economic transformations (Kröger, Reference Kröger2020c) – working in concert with the RDPEs – are essential to explain the return of authoritarian populism (Scoones et al., Reference Scoones, Edelman and Borras2017), nationalism, and other ideologies that drive extractivism and tipping points.

The comparisons presented allow a more concrete observation of the different local, regional, national, and global dynamics present in each place. It is rare to combine examination of industrial forestry (such as tree plantations) and natural forests (such as the Amazon) under the same study, or to compare the tropics and the northern forests. Yet, these comparisons can broaden understandings about where and how landscape changes occur and what are the multiple determinants behind forest politics and policy. This can help with renewing theories by bringing to light the key role of underlying extractivist political economies and varieties of capitalism in deforestation. This is possible due to methodological innovation, as the research is based on a rare depth of analysis accrued through long-term participant observation in the regions studied, compared concertedly via multisited political ethnography and systematic analysis that focus on the process of deforestation. The approach is transdisciplinary, with a focus on the political analysis of developmental processes and agency.

Political Ecology Underpinnings

In my assessment of ranching-land grabbing, mining, and forestry as particular systems, I will be in engage with several theorists of critical agrarian studies and political ecology. Tania Li’s work on oil palm plantations helps when reflecting on the differences of deforesting systems and their dynamics (such as the need for more workers in oil palm plantations than in many other forms of agroextractivism). I intend to add to the theorizing in Li and Semedi (Reference Li and Semedi2021), for example by explaining why the palm oil business has not expanded strongly in Brazil. Their book Plantation Life focuses on detailed ethnographic accounts of corporate-controlled life in Indonesia’s new oil palm plantations. Their take on the topic illustrates how oil palm has become the key RDPE in Indonesia, with the country producing half of all global supply of oil palm. The key difference to Brazil is that the ranches, and the other deforesting plantations (e.g. soybean, corn, cotton, eucalyptus), employ far less people than the 15 million people involved in the oil palm plantations in Indonesia, there being way less “labor life” in this sense in the Brazilian equation. Brazil’s soybean lobby, Aprosoja, claims that soybeans would generate 7.5 million direct and indirect jobs, which is likely a gross overestimation that does not consider the far greater number of peasants dispossessed to expand vast monocultures (see Aprosoja Brasil, n.d.; Kröger, Reference Kröger2022). In fact, I argue that a key reason for this discrepancy can be found in the fact that Brazil’s deforesting land grabbing is driven primarily by an old system and group of mafia-style land actors who make profit principally not via labor exploitation, but by usurping land and then selling it at a higher price, in an illegal and violent process (see Kröger, Reference Kröger2024). While Li and Semedi (Reference Li and Semedi2021) focus on a post-frontier setting (see also Kröger & Nygren, Reference Kröger and Nygren2020), I discuss how the deforesting systems expand by extending different types of extractivist frontiers over forests and their people. An important theoretical take by Li and Semedi (Reference Li and Semedi2021: 9) is their conceptualization of corporations as “occupying force[s]” that use military-like power yet try to convince people of the developmental benefits of their methods. I will explore both these aspects by studying the dominance and hegemony attempts of RDPEs (see Figure 1.6).

Figure 1.6

Pesticide spreading in Nova Mutum, Brazil, on a soybean plantation. RDPEs, such as the soybean sector, can dominate what can exist and how in a given region. Other life-forms are removed in places that used to have rich webs of forest life and biodiversity by the frequent application of agrotoxics that occurs on monoculture plantations. Only the soybean is allowed to remain in place. November 2019.

Photo by author.

Power inequalities, and how power works, are key foci of political ecology. Gramsci (Reference Gramsci1971) argued that dominance refers particularly to the use of tools of coercion, while hegemony refers to partial willingness or persuasion of the subjects to be governed by the hegemon. I use this distinction to study both aspects, looking in detail at the violence, coercion, and cajoling by the extractivist RDPEs and the state forces that are linked to these RDPEs. By dominant and dominance, I also refer to a particular RDPE becoming so central and powerful in a bounded setting that other sectors of the economy, other political manifestations, become underdogs. I observe such machinations of dominant and hegemonic power, as scholars of anticolonial struggles such as Guha and Fanon have done in general, utilizing the notions of Gramsci (Ali, Reference Ali2015). I discuss the focus on trying to attain and maintain consent that is crucial for hegemony, by looking at moral economic transformations supporting and resisting deforesting extractivist sectors.

My theorizing is also linked to the approaches of violence and political ecology put forward by Peluso and Watts (Reference Peluso and Watts2001), which show how the victims (and in some cases proximate agents) of deforestation, such as local rural populations, can be considered by many to be the key culprits of devastation. Instead, my focus on political economic systems shows the deeper structural and systemic roots that push cattle, mining capitalism, and forestry to delimit the agency space of peasant and Indigenous populations. Clearcut will dedicate attention to understanding the dilemmas I encountered in my case contexts, including: (1) how former rubber tappers are now cutting down their own forests and becoming cowboys in Brazil’s Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve (CMER); (2) how some Indigenous populations have started to dig for gold in Peru’s Amazon; and (3) how many Finnish smallholder forest owners are very hostile to forest conservation, preferring to clearcut their old-growth forests rather than getting an equal or greater amount of monetary compensation for conserving their forests. These cases show that we cannot speak throughout of a victim perspective or paint the underdogs as mere victims, since moral economies have shifted drastically, which explains why, in many places, deforesting RDPEs have been able to consolidate and expand. This goes beyond the generalizing claims that are present in many of the global environmental justice discussions or the romanticized accounts put forward by socioenvironmental movements. A stark example of this is how, in Acre, Brazil, against logic, most people, and especially in the multiple-use conservation areas, for example, RESEX (Extractive Reserve) Chico Mendes, voted for Bolsonaroin the October 2022 elections – thus, this dramatic shift needs to be examined through a critical lens (G1, 2022). People’s actions need to be understood as linked to moral economies, whether RDPEs are in place or not.

I also relate my new theory to work done on deforestation in the North American context, including W. Scott Prudham’s (Reference Prudham2004) Knock on Wood and Roger Hayter’s (Reference Hayter2007) Flexible Crossroads. I update and complement the findings on boreal forests’ politics that were included in these books. Prudham (Reference Prudham2004) details the 150 years during which a Douglas fir-based wood products industry was consolidated in the Pacific Northwest of the United States but collapsed in the 1990s due to rapidly rising protection of the last remaining, majestic old-growth forests and species of the region by scientists, environmentalists, concerned locals, and state actors, a protection that was resisted by those wanting to continue logging. This logging RDPE was more akin to a mining economy, the large trunks being mostly removed by the 1990s, leading to the company’s inevitable collapse, as the key commodity source was no more, which led to rising grievances. Meanwhile, the British Columbian forestry sector has been trying to refashion its appetite away from depleting, pest-struck, and contentious old-growth logging toward so-called managed forests; this difficult political economic restructuring being discussed by Hayter (Reference Hayter2007). Simard (Reference Simard2021) provides a biological and forest ecology in-depth criticism of the clearcutting–plantation nexus in these North American contexts, challenging the established views on forests as consisting of competing trees, and therefore arguing that it is not just old-growth forest-depleting logging systems (which caused companies’ own collapses) but misplaced modern forestry practices that need to change. A similar fate may be waiting for the ranching and soybean complexes in the Amazon if the Amazon tipping point is breached and droughts turn the land unproductive. Soils are being extracted and poisoned by agribusiness, but even more worrisome are the possibly irreversible regional and global climate disruptions being caused. In Finland, logging increase has also reached its upper limit, but as the RDPE is focused on pulp and energywood, the depletion of old-growth forests has not led to a natural collapse of the system, which makes that boreal forest struggle more complex. The pulping system hovering over Finnish forest land decision-making has been developed and consolidated for decades, while there are other forest-based RDPEs (such as log overextraction-based ones) in the planet’s other forests, which have different ecological and economic dynamics.

My theorizing challenges the staples thesis of export-led growth (see Watkins, Reference Watkins1963) as too determinist and simplistic, suggesting that instead of the nature of the endowment (type, quantity, and accessibility of a natural resource) at a place, more important are the politics and moral economic struggles around extractive systems. The staples theory purported that in Canadian development and state formation, regional differences could be explained by the key commodity type in the region (for example, wheat and fur produce different political economies). The staples export approach was claimed to be favorable for development, while in later discussions the focus shifted to core–periphery relations where cities aimed to extract these commodities from peripheries, for example in British Columbia (Hutton, Reference Hutton1997). Similar to the staples approach, I provide an in-depth look at how particular economic systems mold nature to produce their key commodity, creating wealth, accumulation, and power by extraction and export of beef, land titles, gold, and pulp. However, the key here is not these commodities themselves, but the systems that are formed around them and their grip on the locality. Thus, I contribute to the key goals of political ecology, delving deeply into the politics and power relations – systemic sectorial qualities of what Blaikie and Brookfield (Reference Blaikie and Brookfield1987) called regional political ecology – linked to global capitalist changes. Their work focused especially on land degradation; forest removal being definitively one such instance of political ecology.

Current studies of global deforestation need to understand the focus is no longer deforestation (as it was decades ago), but the potentially imminent breach of global or regional climate tipping points. This requires a new research agenda or framing of “what is this a case of,” which was a key question in my research.

From the Study of Deforestation to Cases of Breaching Climatic-Ecological Tipping Points

I challenge conventional understandings of resource-based development by bringing tipping points into my analysis. People in policy circles need to understand what is at stake with current deforestation practices. The theoretical take in this book – related to the deeper causes of deforestation and tipping points approach – can shed light on the durable, hard-to-change, and systemic aspects of forest, climate, and land policymaking. Clearcut goes beyond analyses that suppose a new solution was found when deforestation momentarily slowed down, or that all is solved when a new policy is established (as often policies can be reversed more easily than the power of RDPEs or the lingering effects of established moral economies).

New science is refashioning the understanding of what forests and trees are and how they relate to each other via fungus, which in and of itself shows how little we understand of forest ecology. The old views affect the key reasoning and scientific-backing attempts by agribusiness, forestry, and other pro-production scholars. Suzanne Simard’s (Reference Simard2021) pioneering work on forest ecology and the symbiosis between trees and fungus has challenged prior accounts and claims by the forest industry about productivity. This includes discussions on what forests and clearcutting are, and what do they do, ecologically and how they produce profits for and tie particular forest uses into specific sectors. This approach puts my book in conversation with ecology and biology, and studies on political ontology and world-ecology, which allows me to merge the question of existences (that is, who or what has the right to exist and how) to political economic analysis. This makes the theorizing I suggest different from other political ecology or economy works that I have come across. I will include notes on the varying types of effects on existences that are caused by differing deforesting extractivisms being in place. I explore how these shifts are related to changing power relations and – ultimately – to tipping point approaches. Such approaches have already started to affect the productivity of the business systems by exposing their lack of robustness. While Clearcut is rooted in a world-ecology-type understanding of the longue durée of these sectors – regionally and internationally – the purpose is to provide a theory that can be used to make solid prognoses or claims about the future of commodity markets and politics, especially as they relate to forests and their international climate-related politics and policymaking.

The peculiarity and significance of an RDPE becomes evident when it is understood as a regime and system of power that can determine how extraction and climate-related politics play out. Once an RDPE is in place, I hypothesize that there are such big sunk costs that it is hard to change the course or direction of deforesting activities even though that is what is needed to curb the approaching tipping points. These sunk costs include the technologies of extraction, logistical networks, social channels, investment, and debt arrangements, as well as accrued social, symbolic, and physical capital, which is entrenched in the habitus, identities, ideologies, feelings, thoughts, and attitudes of the territory (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1991; Kröger, Reference Kröger2020a). I suggest that theorizing the role of extractivist RDPEs will help to uncover the systemic, ultimate causes of deforestation and the other proximate ecological changes that can trigger tipping points. This hypothesis is systematically compared in the book, which is built on incorporated comparisons – which, where applicable, follow the methodological work of Philip McMichael (Reference McMichael2000) and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) thinking to draw out the complexities of differing causal condition complexes.Footnote ²

When useful to explain the relation of particular social actors and their power to deforestation, I also utilize conceptual tools that I have built based on theorizing by Pierre Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu and Richardson1986, Reference Bourdieu1991) and inspired by him (see also Wacquant, Reference Wacquant2023) on the character and linkages between different types of capital, mainly economic, cultural, social, physical, and symbolic capital. I see these as located in and operated by social, physical, and symbolic spaces (see Wacquant, Reference Wacquant2022), whose changes affect the power relations that capital differences and relations within and between those spaces denote (Kröger Reference Kröger2016, Reference Kröger2020c). I explore how fluctuations in different capital and spaces can explain the power and expansion and contraction of deforesting extractivisms in the Amazon and Finland.

I chose the Amazon and Finland, with their agricultural, mining, and forestry sectors, as foci of attention for several reasons. The broad setting of this book differs from prior books on deforestation or political economy because all the selected case locations are approaching or surpassing global or regional climate tipping points. The Amazon Rainforest and the boreal forests, such as those in Finland, have been identified by earth system scientists McKay et al. (Reference McKay, Staal, Abrams, Winkelmann, Sakschewski, Loriani and Lenton2022) as key global (Amazon) or regional (boreal, taiga forests – comprising 40 percent of world’s forests) climate tipping points. The deforestation dynamics have more acute global and regional ramifications, given the climate tipping point status of these forests. In comparison, the smaller, discontinuous, and already ravaged Southeast Asian and African forests are not listed as global climate tipping points. It is the higher tipping element status of the Amazon and boreal forests which merit focusing on them.

My cases revolve around key global extractivist sectors. They provide a synchronic analysis of dispersed yet globally connected parts of a whole. For example, in the chapter that focuses on gold mining, I will not only draw from Peruvian cases, but I will provide an overall take on the Amazon gold-mining boom, based on my field research at open-pit gold-mining/clearcutting hotspots in Peru and Brazil. I then link these cases with corresponding situations in the Bolivian and Venezuelan contexts, thus drawing out an overall picture of the rampant gold mining across varying Amazonian contexts and how these relate to organized crime expansion in the Amazon. Gold has become a key tool for the money laundering needed by the illicit drug trade. Currently, illegal gold exports are bigger than drug exports as drug trafficking becomes more closely intertwined with so-called artisanal (but in practice highly mechanized) gold mining, which is intensely damaging to the Amazon and its people. Brazil is by far the most important country to study now, as it holds most of the Amazon Rainforest, which is the most important forest-based global climate tipping point. Finland is a progenitor case, where future wood-based bioeconomy technologies and value webs are being tested and created, to possibly be extended globally later – as happened before with pulp mill technologies. Finland is also a curious case of a China-led reprimarization (focusing on the primary sector of commodity production) of the economy, where new mega pulp mills are expanded at the cost of factories that use less wood and produce value-added products. These two trajectories are taking place more strongly in Finland than in the other possible boreal forestry case study locations, such as Sweden or Canada (Finland is also the location of far more multinational forestry corporations). This book takes a critical look at the current practices of forestry, where boreal forests are being replaced by tree plantations – mostly spruce in Finland – even though clearcutting is likely to exacerbate beetle outbreaks and fires. In Finland, most attention is placed on the pulping–energywood complex. This is linked to the European Union (EU) and global carbon-capture markets and agreements, wherein Finnish taxpayers now stand to pay billions of euros to the EU due to overlogging in forests, which has caused increased emissions, which need to be compensated in the national accounts.

Ecological and climatic considerations need to be woven into the analysis of deforesting economic systems, whose profit-making logics are rapidly changing, deteriorating – even collapsing – due to their own hyper-extractivist logics and impacts. The Amazon beef/soy-tipping point relation illustrates this. The paradox where rampant Amazon deforestation is shown to linearly decrease agribusiness profits and productivity has been dubbed the “agro-suicide,” as agribusiness would need to conserve the Amazon and Cerrado to avoid deadly heatwaves (Flach et al., Reference Flach, Abrahão and Bryant2021) and to ensure rainfall and thus revenues (Leite-Filho et al., Reference Leite-Filho, Soares-Filho, Davis, Abrahão and Börner2021). This linearity is now turning into even more abrupt, nonlinear possibilities, due to the possibility of properties of the Amazon Rainforest tipping element changing when 20–25 percent is deforested. After that point of no return, irreversible (at least during the span of a single human lifetime) savannization and desertification can expand faster over much of the Amazon.

Hypotheses on Causalities of Deforestation

We already have ample evidence that where territorial land use is defined by nonmarket-based valuations of the forest, the forest cover is much better retained than where it is not. This situation is found, for example, in Indigenous lands and conservation units that host traditional forest-dwelling populations who rely mostly on forest product sustenance rather than on producing for outside markets (Blackman et al., Reference Blackman, Corral, Lima and Asner2017). These areas still manage to remain mostly outside the reach of extractivist capitalisms (see Gudynas Reference Gudynas, Haslam and Heidrich2016, Reference Gudynas, Veltmeyer and Bowles2017) and their underlying conceptualizations of nature (see Moore, Reference Moore2015; see also Figure 1.7).

Figure 1.7

Ancient, massive, and tall trees can still be found in many parts of the Amazon conservation areas. FLONA Tapajós, Brazil, December 2023.

Photo by author.

However, this situation is prone to change and therefore I compared conservation areas where cattle capitalism is causing serious deforestation (such as the CMER in Acre) (Kröger, Reference Kröger2020c) and those where it is not (such as RESEX Tapajós-Arapiuns in Pará). The theoretical-methodological underpinning of this approach is that multisited political ethnography and in-depth tracing of political economic processes across local–global scales, along with the scales of valuation (logics and worldviews) sustaining them, is essential to grasp the causes of (and thus solutions for) the renewed rise in deforestation. In the beginning of this research project, I laid out a series of hypotheses to guide the analysis. These were based on my prior research and existing literature on the causes of deforestation and were the starting point over a several-year period as a basis for inquiry, interviews, field visits, comparisons, and building the theory. For the sake of the book’s readability, I will not explicitly refer to these hypotheses throughout the book, although I do discuss them and provide answers to these initial, working hypotheses.

Hypothesis 1: The regionally dominant natural resource sectors are the key explanatory factors in how, where, when, and if deforestation occurs, despite the type of government, official land titling (e.g. conservation areas), or social actor deforesting.

Subhypotheses:

1. (1a) There is a significant causality running between the type of extractivism – the regionally dominant form of resource capitalism – and forest land use. The dominant political economy is the ultimate cause and driver of deforestation.

2. (1b) There are significant subvariations between extractive sectors and deforestation impacts. For example, different types of mining, ranching-land speculation, and industrial forestry portray different dynamics of forest land use, which are also visible physically (e.g. in satellite imagery).

3. (1c) Government policies and state structures directing forest uses flow from the extractivist system in power. Brazil is primarily (but not only) a case of cattle–land speculation, Peru is a case of mining extractivism, and Finland is a case of forestry capitalism.

4. (1d) Infrastructure, such as road-building policies, or actions by local deforestation agents (such as rural inhabitants), may be proximate or even necessary causes, but cannot alone explain deforestation (i.e. they are not the ultimate or even sufficient causes).

Hypothesis 2: The current interstate system values the free flow of commodities more than retaining primary forests.

Subhypotheses:

1. (2a) Interstate rivalry, geopolitics, and building nation-state power are key explanations for why deforesting activities are perpetuated.

2. (2b) Epochal international moments, such as wars and pandemics, create important opportunities to accumulate capital faster through deforesting activities for a short period of time, which leads to major deforestation drives, with long-lasting deforesting impacts.

3. (2c) Political economic sectors, corporations, and linked nation-states whose models of power and capital accumulation are premised on clearcutting forests work actively to retain the flow of commodities from deforested areas, despite rising global crises this causes.

The following alternative hypotheses were used to test the primary hypotheses and to enrich the findings:

Alternative Hypothesis 3: It does not matter what type of extractive capitalism is dominant in each region – deforestation politics are defined more significantly by other factors – there is no major difference between cattle ranching, mining, or industrial forestry; rather, it is the demographics, geography, endowments, and the activities of social and political-economic actors, other than those in the dominant extractive sector, which are sufficient to explain when, where, and how deforestation occurs.

Alternative Hypothesis 4: Concerted political actions by governments, civil society, and alternative economic sectors can significantly counter deforestation. Deforestation – the power of extractive capitalisms – can be seriously curbed by fostering:

1. (4a) Embeddedness between progressive state authorities and forest-dwellers, which retains their autonomy yet results in effective forest management that can counter the power of extractivism – political force can counter deforestation.

2. (4b) Nondeforesting economic activities, which increase the value of standing (semi)natural forests – alternative economies can counter deforestation.

3. (4c) Alternative, marginal, or noneconomic forest values and scales of valuation – changes in worldviews, forest ontologies, and ideology can counter deforestation.

As Alternative Hypothesis 4 indicates, I will also assess the power relations and boundaries of deforesting political economies via analysis of resistance to them, as such research is especially helpful in understanding how political rather than economic processes may be dominant. Many causes have been given for deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon and these hypotheses constitute an add-on to those of past studies. The classic political economies emphasize how the integration of the region into the national economy pushed the pioneer/resource frontier to the Amazon (Foweraker, Reference Foweraker1981). The common way to ensure land tenure has been to deforest and make the land “productive,” typically via cattle pastures, and this activity is still semilegal, or at least practiced without any efficient environmental monitoring or licensing (Fearnside, Reference Fearnside2008). This being the state of affairs, or the political economic structure, it is understandable that analyses by economists, such as Ferreira and Coelho (Reference Ferreira and Coelho2015), whose goal has been to identify the key explanatory variables, have argued that agricultural commodity prices and public policies are the two key independent variables. However, this type of analysis does not cast light on the political-economic power through which deforestation takes place, or how this happens. In other words, it does not uncover the complex political economic and international dynamics that the hypotheses address.

Furthermore, the intersectorial and multisited research design adopted here can provide a rare analysis of the important determinants of deforestation at a scale above the local; for example, the expansion of soybean plantations has pushed the cattle frontier deeper into the Amazon (Domingues & Bermann, Reference Domingues and Bermann2012), but tree plantation expansion has had similar effects (which makes analysis of the forest sector’s indirect role in deforestation also important; see Kröger, Reference Kröger2013a). Yet, despite this, these dynamics are not often compared. The comparison of neighboring Peru and Brazil in the Amazon through these hypotheses offers a viewpoint into how and why cattle ranching has not (yet) expanded into Peru along the new Pacific Highway. Meanwhile, in other regions neighboring Brazil, such as Paraguay and Bolivia, Brazilian soybean farmers have radically expanded their soy capitalism (McKay, Reference McKay2018). This offers support for the notion that different extractive systems have different operating logics and thus different territorial reaches. I go even further to suggest that these varieties of extractivism (see Gudynas, Reference Gudynas, Haslam and Heidrich2016) are also tied to different political power groups and pushed by states and governments operating according to different principles, which explains when and where they expand, as the power balance between these groups fluctuates. Thus, this type of take on deforestation assesses how different political economic systems explain deforestation.

Many of the theories and the hypotheses being tested in this book challenge the prevailing understandings of causalities and could help in the pursuit of truly sustainable forest governance. A typical argument used by forest scientists or economists is that deforestation would be best curbed if forests were made to produce more profits than those accrued through their destruction (see, e.g. Ignatius, Reference Ignatius2017). However, such arguments assume that the solutions to our problems can be found within modernity, without major changes to the scales of valuation that dominate in modern development (i.e. capital’s commensurability project, wherein life is quantifiable and tradable as a commodity). World-ecology has convincingly argued that the solutions cannot be found there, as capitalism is a commodity frontier and class relation relying on the continued appropriation of natural resources (Moore, Reference Moore2015) and destruction of lived environments (Kröger, Reference Kröger2022). What is needed is to not only equalize power and class relations, but also to change the scales of valuation, to offer new kinds of valuations, where life and natural forests have intrinsic value. The recent (and largely failed) attempts to create ecosocialism by leftist governments in Latin America attest to the need to go beyond extractivisms and developmentalisms in all their varieties if a solution is to be found (Gudynas, Reference Gudynas, Veltmeyer and Bowles2017; Warnecke-Berger et al., Reference Warnecke-Berger, Burchardt and Dietz2023). The solutions must be found in molding the key processes causing deforestation, which requires deeper knowledge about them. The understanding of “development” needs to be questioned, to accommodate for forest existences.

I will first assess, in Part II, Brazil’s land-grabbing cattle capitalism and soy agribusiness roles and linkages. I then study state actions as an enabler of and a barrier to deforestation. I also look at the role resistance has played in deforesting contexts. Similarly, in Part III, the gold mining–organized crime nexus across the Amazon is explored for its drivers, enabling factors, and resistance, both from civil society and the state. I compare the situations and links between the three most important illegal gold-mining areas in the Amazon – Peru’s Madre de Dios Province, the middle Tapajós River area in southwestern Pará in Brazil, and the triple frontier between Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil. Part III ends the study of the Amazon by analyzing several suggested solutions to curbing the power of deforesting actors and avoiding future deforestation. Part IV explores the pulping of Finland by clearcutting and growing resistance to this trend. This part serves as an exploration of how a sector becomes dominant and hegemonic, retaining its hegemony in the society and moral economy despite waning importance and power. In Part V, I delve briefly into the international and global setting, still characterized by interstate rivalry and the looming global climate tipping points. I make some notes on the current deforestation in the world-ecology, based on an understanding of long-term deforestation being driven by interstate rivalry and competition, where the free flow of commodities is retained, although some attempts are being made to curb global deforestation by certification and regional regulatory schemes, such as the EU anti-deforestation law, which are critically explored. The conclusions summarize the key arguments across the book.